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Poster: Visual16 Date: Jan 20, 2007 8:15am
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Music in prelinger archive movies - la bamba not public domain?

Having watched hundreds of these films, finding something recognizable is actually a difficult task. There are actually people out there who think that singing "Happy Birthday to you" is a copyright infringement. I would say if you are really uptight about this, find Richie Valens publisher and ask about form SR licencing for "La Bamba" I don't see how a scratchy optical soundtrack rendition excerpt affects this enormous body of Public Domain footage, in that most of the music is anonymous and we would LOVE TO BUY more of it, but no one even knows who wrote or recorded it. They aren't given credit on the films themselves! I don't believe they are trying to snare anyone into trouble with this, one of the most profound contributions to the entire Internet. I think most people would leave this thread alone but that's my two cents as a private user, not representing this archive...

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Poster: scooter_nyc Date: Feb 12, 2007 6:21am
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Music in prelinger archive movies - la bamba not public domain?

Amen. You know, one of the huge problems with the public being generally more aware of copyright issues is that there's a lot of misinformation and assumption floating around out there. Intellectual property is not an easy subject, especially if we're talking about the use of music in films.

To the original poster: if you feel that the use of the song in question is going to get you into some sort of legal trouble on your project, then simply don't use it!

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Poster: MediaWhore Date: Mar 7, 2007 7:48pm
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Music in prelinger archive movies - la bamba not public domain?

I have often wondered about this same issue myself. I would suspect that no authority from the prelinger archives has responded to this thread is that since this is a murky area they do not want to get caught in the middle should any legal issues arise. Overall I would think that 99.999% of all this material is perfectly legal but it leaves you wondering about that other .01%